The History of the Seminary

A view of the seminary from Seminary Hill.

As part of our first-anniversary celebration in May 2022, we hosted an event on the history of the Franciscan Seminary that is our namesake. The tower that anchors the view from the Tasting Room tops a multipurpose building that once housed a seminary that educated young men interested in the priesthood and today serves as a Job Corps that offers vocational training to low-income youth.

In the late nineteenth century, a boarding house, the Callicoon Mountain House, stood on the site overlooking the Delaware River. In 1901 the Franciscans opened St. Joseph's Seraphic Seminary on the site, housing students and faculty in the renovated boarding house while building today's structure. Designed by NYC firm Wakeman and Miller, the four-story brick structure with a bluestone front was dedicated in 1911, with the archbishop from New York in attendance. (In homage to the earlier building, Seminary Hill uses bluestone to front the ground floor of the Cidery.)

The Kling family outside the Callicoon Mountain House.

St. Joseph's Seraphic Seminary was a boarding school for high-school-aged boys considering further study and ordination. In 1937 the school received accreditation to offer an associate's degree in addition to a high school diploma, according to the research of John Conway, the Sullivan County historian. He spoke at the Seminary Hill event.

Vintage post card.

Also speaking was Creighton Drury, a student at St. Joseph's from 1960 to 1966. He has retired to Callicoon with his wife after a career in human services. He outlined a typical student's day, waking up at 5:30, attending morning mass and evening prayers, mastering all the New York Regents exam subjects, playing competitive sports against area high schools, and doing manual labor around the campus. (One job was tending the dairy cows who grazed in what is now the Seminary Hill orchard.)

Although the seminary was "strict," the experience was "deeply spiritual." He and his fellow students made lifelong friendships and remained in touch.  

Several other former students also attended the Seminary Hill event. As they noted, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, fewer and fewer graduates went on to become priests, and so the Franciscans sold the property to the US Department of Labor, which turned the campus into a Job Corps center.

Although the current program has a very different focus from St. Joseph's Seraphim Seminary, we hope that the current students find the experience as transformational as did their predecessors.